“... while Henry Porter (whose Two Angry Women of Abingdon influenced The Merry Wives of Windsor) may have been still younger when he was killed in a duel by John Day, another playwright, in 1599. John Lyly, who gave up writing for 15 years to concentrate on his unsuccessful career in politics, made it to his early fifties, and John Marston lived to nearly ...”

“... of Lockerbie victims now believe that the former Libyan intelligence officer is innocent. Robert Black QC, an emeritus professor of Scottish law at Edinburgh University, was one of the architects of the original trial in Holland. He has closely followed developments since the disaster happened and in 2000 devised the non-jury trial system for the ...”

“... Messiaen’s goal, exactly: he wrote music to praise God, not to proselytise. Nonetheless, as Robert Sholl argues in his ‘critical biography’, it’s not easy to disentangle Messiaen’s art from his belief that in composing he was ‘making a transcendent God empirical and sensate’. The music, Sholl suggests, allows ‘believers and non-believers ...”

“... winner who cannot in fact swim, and by us, the readers.The joke, if it is a joke, is that heroism may be a function of incompetence. Or that we only have winners because we are losers. Or that being the best at something is being unable to do it. Or, indeed, that we have the wrong idea about what it is to swim, or to win a race, or even about what a race ...”

“... dominant version, liberalism – sets about applying morality to politics. In what future writers may come to think of as the palmy days of political moralism, theorists have tried to imagine what politics would be like if it were redesigned according to a moral prospectus. It is not usually thought that actually existing politics shadows moral norms very ...”

“... journals produced in Berlin, Prague and Paris. The general effect, however invidious comparisons may be, is of a mixture of Browning, Hugo Von Hofmannsthal and Robert Lowell, with something of Whitman’s breezy effect of easing himself in poetry’s words. If that sounds bizarre – well, she is in many ways a bizarre ...”

“... and found it to be at a very low ebb. Perhaps he should have looked a little farther. The water may be receding over the mudflats on his stretch of coast, but round the corner it is flooding strongly. The black tide that Freud was so afraid of in the early years of the century has been making a steady advance. When I was a boy no one knew the signs of the ...”

“... among analytic philosophers (he is often referred to as ‘the smartest philosopher in America’) may, at this point, still expect that these large questions will, as usual, rapidly be reformulated so as to abandon the non-technical level at which they were initially asked. But the very next paragraph shifts the tone. ‘Our various questions,’ Nozick ...”

“... In the Economist of 27 May 1978, details were published of a secret report by a Conservative Party policy group on the nationalised industries. Each industry would be allocated a minimum rate of return on capital; managers who failed to achieve this target would be sacked. The report, drafted by the MP Nicholas Ridley, recognised that the pressures to economise would inevitably threaten management-union conflict ...”

“... serendipitously. No, it is Keiller’s praxis that defines what the films are, and while he may disavow the notion that they create a revolutionary new space, I believe the increasingly rhapsodic reception they have received over the years from members of ‘the current tendency’ speaks of their success in achieving exactly this. The ‘peculiar ...”

“... a monumental pair of binoculars as the entrance to the offices of a large advertising agency. This may suit the client, but it manipulates the rest of us, and reduces architecture to a 3-D billboard. The Pop dimension remains strong in his work, even when disguised as a symbolic use of otherwise abstract materials, colours and forms; and it came as no surprise ...”

“... Reading may not make the world go round but it can make it go away, for a while. If one’s world is dirty, poor, oppressive and unfair, then that may be no small service. Books furnish the mind in a form that the bailiffs cannot repossess. If we could recover the reading practices of past generations, we would be in touch with an experience that was at once intimate and formative, on a par with, even part of, the history of love ...”

“... house in Cheshire and his mind would all his life pullulate – like that of his mother’s cousin Robert Louis Stevenson – in a ‘nursery-sickroom atmosphere’. His father, a captain in the York and Lancasters, was killed at Ypres in May 1915. His maternal grandmother, Emily, was ‘a great psychosomatic ...”

“... but someone who would respond with appropriate bonhomie to a gentleman’s confidences: ‘You may be thinking that when Myrtle and Robert made up to each other I made fun of it, and that when Myrtle made up tome I solemnly took it all in. You are quite right.’ With a little practice, of course, one comes to respond to ...”

“... suggested) that they are utterly opposed to the Enlightenment and all its scientistic fruits. Marx may not be charged fairly with the sin of individualism (he is as vehement in his condemnation of liberal atomism as any of the communitarians), but he is as guilty, if not more guilty, of materialism, atheism, rationalism, optimism and the general subversion of ...”